Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

This is remarkable: the Chinese Communist Party finally bows to a street protest

On Sunday something quite remarkable happened in the Chinese port of Dalian – model industrial city, host of the World Economic Forum and (by the by) mooring place of China’s new aircraft carrier.

As we reported yesterday, thousands of ordinary middle-class folk turned up in the city’s main square to demand the closure of a nearby chemical plant and…wait for it…the local Communist Party officials agreed.

It’s hard to express how potentially momentous an occasion this could turn out to be. Not because the Chinese government never makes U-turns, or listens to the people, but because it did so in apparent response to a street protest.

This linkage – between taking to the streets and getting your way – is one that the Chinese government is desperate to avoid at all costs.

Olympics fans will remember how the Chinese government agreed to "protest parks" during the 2008 Games, and then promptly handed out "re-education through labour" punishments to anyone who dared applied for the right to protest.

Even two grandmothers, aged 77 and 79, found themselves being punished. This was not because the government feared them per se, but because it was terrified of the precedent: if the grannies were allowed to protest, the party feared others might well reason, “why shouldn’t we?”

Mobile phone pictures from the protest (see here) show protesters directly giving "the bird" to the Communist Party HQ and leadership, while others also show ordinary families, including children, confronting the ranks of riot officers in the name of their own health and public safety.

At every turn these have been deleted from the web, while Dalian and “PX” (the offending chemical) and many other connected terms have been barred on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, and official reports have downplayed all linkage between the protest and the decision to shut the factory.

Even the website of China’s State Council, or Cabinet, appears to have removed a statement referencing the decision after just an hour this morning.

But what happens if word of what really happened gets out? If people crystallize the fact that 12,000 people marched in Dalian last weekend and got what they wanted. What if they start to wonder if that would work in Chengdu, or Shenzhen or for that matter in Lhasa or Urumqi, or anywhere else?

Would the authorities, still haunted as they are by the ghosts of Tiananmen, where they let the protests swell out of control and then were forced into using excessive force, be quite so “reasonable” and “adaptable” then? I dare say they would not.

We’ll have to wait and see on this story a number of counts – whether the government really does move the chemical plant; whether those identified as organisers of the protest get arrested and what political price, if any, Dalian’s political leaders will pay for their failures.